Human Rights and Justice for All

Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World

Carrie Walling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000536805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Human rights is an empowering framework for understanding and addressing justice issues at local, domestic, and international levels. This book combines US-based case studies with examples from other regions of the world to explore important human rights themes – the equality, universality, and interdependence of human rights, the idea of international crimes, strategies of human rights change, and justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of human rights violations. From Flint and Minneapolis to Xinjiang and Mt. Sinjar, this book challenges a wide variety of readers – students, professors, activists, human rights professionals, and concerned citizens – to consider how human rights apply to their own lives and equip them to be changemakers in their own communities.

1

Understanding Human Rights as Lived Experience

DOI: 10.4324/9781003256939-2

We experience human rights or their violation in deeply personal ways. We advance human rights or we fuel human wrongs through our choices, actions, and inactions. This book is about the fight for human rights – the contestation over their meaning, the politics of their recognition, the struggle by people for their realization, and the tools and tactics that support political change. For while we each have a claim to our human rights, too often they remain unfulfilled or are actively challenged by the decisions of political leaders and the practices of powerful institutions. When human rights are denied, they must be demanded and fought for. When they are achieved, they must be regularly exercised and actively protected. The claim to rights, and the responsibilities for them, belong to people in all regions of the world, all forms of government, and countries at all stages of economic development. Whether respect for human rights grows or their disregard widens depends on our embrace of equality or discrimination, pursuit of inclusion or exclusion, and support for justice or impunity. We learn more about human rights and human wrongs by examining them in the contexts in which they occur. The case studies in this text and the stories of the people who have struggled within them invite us to link ideas with practices and to consider how we can build a more equal, just, and rights-filled world. They invite us to imagine how we might “live human rights” at home and abroad.

Human rights are the rights every human being is born with. Human rights are about more than survival; they include those things that are essential to a life of dignity. These rights never go away even if those in power do not recognize them – they are inalienable. Human rights are universal. They are different than the rights granted by governments to their citizens. All human beings are born with human rights, do nothing to earn them, and their rights travel with them wherever they reside and no matter what border they cross. All human beings are equal in dignity and rights. Equality means that they apply to all persons regardless of gender, sex, race, religion, nationality, economic status, ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, political belief, age, or any distinction of any kind. Importantly, all human rights are interdependent and interrelated. This means that human beings must have access to all their rights to achieve dignity. The violation of any single right limits the enjoyment of other rights. Human rights are an entitlement. They are not simply good or desirable. They are not a gift. People suffer harm when they are deprived of the human rights to which they are entitled. Although human rights are seldom fully realized, and often violated, that does not mean they do not exist. Rather, it is the deprivation of our human rights that mobilizes political action to claim them. In sum, human rights are the rights that every human is entitled to and are necessary for a life of dignity. Human rights are inalienable, equal, and interdependent.

The content of our human rights are described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which passed without dissent in 1948 by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, is legally codified in multiple international treaties, and was reaffirmed by UN members from all regions of the world through regional treaties and at the World Conference of Human Rights in 1993 and again in the UN 75 Declaration of 2020.¹ Available in more than 500 languages and dialects, the UDHR is the most widely translated document in the world. The UDHR is composed of 30 articles which promote a shared vision of basic human rights and dignities that apply to all people in all nations (see Box 1.1). The preamble identifies respect for these human rights as, “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and disregard for human rights as barriers to their achievement. The 30 articles entail a variety of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. These include the right to life (Article 3), peaceful assembly (Article 20), religion (Article 18), free and fair trial processes and humane treatment (Articles 5, 8–10), as well as reasonable work conditions, fair pay (Article 23), access to education (Article 26), and participation in cultural life and scientific advances (Article 27). By presenting these rights in a single document, the drafters signaled that these basic rights were interrelated and mutually reinforcing. For example, Article 6 says that everyone has the right to recognition as a person before the law – the right to a legal identity. The right to a legal identity is connected to every other human right in the UDHR and all the rights examined in this book. A legal identity is needed to access healthcare, education, to vote, to cross an international border, to open a bank account which is necessary for employment in the formal job sector, and to own property. Without access to a legal identity, people are uncounted and unprotected. Children without a legal identity are vulnerable to labor exploitation, human trafficking and enslavement, forced marriage, involuntary military service, and with no legal record of their existence there may be no record that they are missing. The World Bank estimates that more than 1 billion people worldwide lack a legal identity.² The loss of this single right makes it more likely their other human rights also will be violated.

Box 1.1 The 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 1: Right to Equality

Article 2: Freedom from Discrimination

Article 3: Right to Life, Liberty and Personal Security

Article 4: Freedom from Slavery

Article 5: Freedom from Torture and Degrading Treatment

Article 6: Right to Recognition as a Person before the Law

Article 7: Right to Equality before the Law

Article 8: Right to Remedy by Competent Tribunal

Article 9: Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest and Exile

Article 10: Right to a Fair Public Hearing

Article 11: Right to be Considered Innocent until Proven Guilty

Article 12: Prohibition on Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence

Article 13: Right to Free Movement in and out of the Country

Article 14: Right to Seek Asylum in other Countries from Persecution

Article 15: Right to a Nationality and Freedom to Change Nationality

Article 16: Right to Marriage and Family (and equal rights within it)

Article 17: Right to Own Property

Article 18: Freedom of Belief and Religion

Article 19: Freedom of Opinion and Information

Article 20: Right of Peaceful Assembly and Association

Article 21: Right to Participate in Government and in Free Elections

Article 22: Right to Social Security

Article 23: Right to Desirable Work and to Join Trade Unions

Article 24: Right to Rest and Leisure

Article 25: Right to Adequate Standard of Living

Article 26: Right to Education

Article 27: Right to Participate in Cultural Life of Community and Share in Scientific Advances

Article 28: Entitlement to a Social and International Order Protective of Human Rights

Article 29: Everyone has Duties to Community and to Allow the Exercise of Rights of Others

Article 30: Freedom from State of Personal Interference in the Realization of these Rights

The UDHR provides a guiding framework but putting human rights into practice involves struggle over their meaning and how they should be applied in specific contexts. In practice, even interdependent rights can come into conflict. My claim to a right might conflict with the fulfillment of yours, or an individual rights claim might conflict with the rights claim of a group. For any of us to enjoy human rights, others must be allowed to exercise their rights as well.³ How to do so justly and in an equitable manner is a source of contestation. Yet everyone has the responsibility to respect human rights (Article 29) and to create a world in which they can be realized (Article 28). Furthermore, governments have a special three-fold responsibility to uphold human rights. Governments have an obligation to respect human rights and not violate rights themselves. Governments have a second obligation to protect human rights, meaning that governments must protect individuals and groups from having their rights violated or abused by others. Governments also have an obligation to fulfill human rights. They must take positive action to facilitate the enjoyment of basic rights by their people. This tripartite understanding of duty-bearer responsibilities is commonly referred to as a “human rights-based approach (HRBA).”⁴ When governments fail to offer these protections, they are guilty of human rights violations.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a politically negotiated text that reflects the shared values of its drafters, who were drawn from all regions of the world. A global consensus in support of human rights emerged at the end of World War II but the groundwork for the Universal Declaration was laid in earlier decades by non-state actors, lawyers, and diplomats.⁵ The horrors of the Holocaust and the devastating effect of the war mobilized support for an internationally recognized set of human rights and made its adoption politically possible.⁶ The diverse origins of the UDHR are often overlooked. It is a common critique to suggest that human rights are not truly universal but rather reflect the values of western industrialized states.⁷ This claim overlooks the vital contribution that small states and states from the global south made to the inclusion of human rights in the Charter of the United Nations (UN) and the substantive content of human rights in the UDHR. It also underestimates great power ambivalence toward human rights at the time of their adoption.⁸ In fact, both the US and the UK faced significant domestic opposition to the UDHR from constituencies afraid its adoption would force a reckoning on racial segregation and colonialism, respectively.⁹

While human rights are mentioned seven times in the UN Charter, their inclusion was the result of extensive lobbying by the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) community, small states (especially from Latin America), and states representing the global south. It was not driven by the great powers; some of whom were deeply ambivalent about the project.¹⁰ Later, the Unive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Understanding Human Rights as Lived Experience
• 2. Equality and Non-Discrimination
• 3. The Interdependence of Human Rights
• 4. International Crimes
• 5. Justice and Reconciliation after Atrocity
• 6. Making Human Rights Change
• 7. An Introduction to the Human Rights Advocacy Toolkit
• Index